Politics, law, social justice, music, baseball and miscellany, and not necessarily in that order.

Friday, June 29, 2012

California's Cruel And Unusual Death Penalty 40 Years And $4 Billion After Furman v. Georgia

San Quentin State Prison

40 years ago today, the United States Supreme Court decided Furman v. Georgia, which struck down existing death penalty laws as unconstitutional in violation of the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual clause. California's death penalty was quickly reinstated.

Attempting to comply with Furman,
the new statute made the death penalty mandatory for certain first
degree murders and other crimes. But in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court
struck
down death penalty laws that provided for mandatory death sentences.
The California Supreme Court, relying on the high court's ruling, once
again found
the state's statute to be unconstitutional.

Undeterred, the
California legislature passed a new death penalty law in 1977. This
was followed in 1978 by a ballot proposition, known as the Briggs
Amendment,
which was similar but more expansive version that sought to encompass
more -- virtually all -- categories of murder (including unintentional
murders committed during certain felonies). Briggs passed and it is the
law we are living with, so to speak, today.

Forty years after Furman: $4 billion dollars, over a thousand
death sentences, over 720 currently on death row, and 13 executions,
none since January 2006.Tani Cantil-Sakauye,
after one year as the Chief Justice of the State of California, has
concluded that the state's capital punishment system is "not effective"
and requires "structural changes" that the State cannot afford. Her
predecessor, Ron George, who was Chief Justice for 15 years, came to the
same conclusion, describing California's death penalty scheme as
"dysfunctional."

An extensive study by
Arthur Alarcon, long-time judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal,
who, together with law professor Paula Mitchell, determined that
California's
death penalty system is currently costing the
state about $184 million per year. They concluded that "since
reinstating the
death penalty in 1978, California taxpayers have spent roughly $4
billion to fund a dysfunctional death penalty system that has carried
out no more than 13 executions."

Justice Byron White observed in Furman that:

When imposition of the penalty reaches a certain degree of
infrequency, it would be very doubtful that any existing general need
for retribution would be measurably satisfied. Nor could it be said
with confidence that society’s need for specific deterrence justifies
death for so few when for so many in like circumstances life
imprisonment or shorter prison terms are judged sufficient, or that
community values are measurably reinforced by authorizing a penalty so
rarely invoked.”

The infrequency of
executions and the randomness with regard to which condemned inmates
actually will be executed have made a mockery of the supposedly rational
justifications for the death penalty. In addition, given the current
backlog and the serious problems identified by the California Commission for the Fair Administration of Justice (CCFAJ) -- problems
that would require an enormous influx of state funds to fix -- it simply
is not possible that defendants who are only now being sentenced to
death will have their death sentences carried out. Because it is “so
wantonly and so freakishly” used, California’s death penalty has become a
wholly arbitrary punishment in the same sense as the death penalty laws
that were struck down in Furman.

Justice Potter Stewart famously characterized the Texas and Georgia statutes at issue in Furman as being “cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by
lightning is cruel and unusual.” What he meant was that of all those
who committed death eligible crimes, the petitioners were “among a
capriciously selected random handful upon whom the sentence of death has
in fact been imposed . . . [and] the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments
cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of death under legal
systems that permit this unique penalty to be so wantonly and so
freakishly imposed.”

Application of Furman’s benchmark for determining arbitrariness demonstrates that only a
“capriciously selected random handful” of death-sentenced inmates in
California will actually be executed. A new death row prisoner would
have to get in line behind 720 condemned inmates. He or she would then
have to wait years for appointment of appellate counsel (currently a 5
year wait) and even longer for the appointment of state habeas counsel
(8-10 years). Even after these lawyers are appointed and appellate
briefs and habeas petitions are filed, the case will not be heard and
decided before the several hundreds of cases that have preceded it. And
then, after all this time and expense, the California Supreme Court, in
virtually every case regardless of the merits, will uphold the death
sentence. Then the case moves on to federal court, which has its own
backlog, and often requires new counsel, with proceedings currently
averaging over six years in district court followed by over four years
of appellate review.

Justice White noted in Furman that where the “penalty is so
infrequently imposed that the threat of execution is too attenuated to
be of substantial service to criminal justice” it is unconstitutional.
As he stated, when the death penalty “ceases realistically to further
[the social ends it was deemed to serve] . . . its imposition would
then be the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal
contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. A penalty
with such negligible returns to the State would be patently excessive
and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.”

We have far surpassed this point in California.

The SAFE California Act is on the November ballot. If it passes it would replace California's
multi‑billion dollar death penalty with life imprisonment without parole
and require those convicted of murder to work and pay restitution to
victim families through the victim compensation fund. It would also set aside $100 million in budget saving for
local law enforcement for the investigation of unsolved rape and murder
cases.

Please join the effort to replace the death penalty by clicking here: SAFE California.

1
comments
:

Anonymous
said...

The arguments in support of the ballot measure to abolish the death penalty are exaggerated at best and, in most cases, misleading and erroneous. The Act would only make our prisons less safe for both other prisoners and prison officials, significantly increase the costs to taxpayers due to life-time medical costs, the increased security required to coerce former death-row inmates to work, etc. The amount “saved” in order to help fund law enforcement is negligible and only for a short period of time. Bottom line, the “SAFE” Act is an attempt by those who are responsible for the high costs and lack of executions to now persuade voters to abandon it on those ground. Obviously, these arguments would disappear if the death penalty was carried forth in accordance with the law. Get the facts at and supporting evidence at http://cadeathpenalty.webs.com.